A nobleman among geeks, the great stargazer Patrick Moore passed away yesterday at the age of 89. Born in 1923, the great man racked up many geek accolades in his long career of star watching, contributing to the NASA moon landings and holding the world record for the longest running TV show with the same presenter for his 55 …

RIP Sir Patrick

I've been watching The Sky At Night for as long as I can remember, and he had the rare gift of communicating sometimes complicated information with clarity and obvious love for his subject. You'll be sorely missed, Sir.

Will be missed.

Was very saddened to hear this news last night. Well done Reg on taking the time to give a wonderful tribute to a great British institution. I'll really miss his Xylophone exploits too which only served to make him even more fascinating to me while growing up. I do hope his hometown has the good sense to turn his residence into a museum of sorts. Would be great for all those not fortunate to have witnessed his genius and eccentricity while he was alive to experience the lifes work of such a legend.

The man was an unrepentant bigot. He though women had no place being on TV - and if they had to be, should have a TV channel of their own. Also a thorough-going racist, by all accounts (and I'm talking of accounts by people I know who met him and had the misfortune to know him reasonably well).

What he did, he did well. He's left a great legacy in terms of inspiring people in the realm of science and astronomy. But as a person, no great loss...

His views on women were a bit 1920s ! But so are those of the majority of churches and yet we let them carry on.

Having spoken to other people who knew him professionally - I don't think racist is fair. Just very anti-european, specifically anti-German. And anti- the hypocracy that we must have a race relations act, saying you can't say anything about race - championed by a succession of governments who are all rich white eton-educated anglicans.

And yet....

...last night I saw Heather Couper reading out a letter he sent her when she wrote to him asking if being a girl was a handicap when it came to being an astronomer. He was charming and answered that it was no handicap at all and that she should strive to become an astronomer if she was interested.

So I don't quite buy the misogynist aspect of Patrick, I've seen him on the telly for my whole life and I've never seen him be anything other than charming and very interesting and talented.

I certainly won't be thinking bigoted thoughts when I look up at the stars.

@Dick Kennedy

You obviously failed to see the much repeated BBC obituary items where Heather Couper showed her letter which Sir Patrick wrote to her about her question as to whether sexism was a problem in astronomy. The reply was, "Let me reassure you on one point. Being a girl is no handicap at all".

You are also presumably unaware that many broadcasters cultivate an exaggerated version of their own personalities as an image tool. Some admit to it, others don't. Sir Patrick also had far longer than most to add to his on-screen persona.

Either cite your 'sources' or continue being as close-minded as the man you purport to have disliked.

"The man was an unrepentant bigot."

So was my granddad.

Sir Patrick Moore was 89 years old. Like my granddad, he was born and raised at a time when wives really did stay at home. (They didn't have much choice: we still had outdoor toilets and mangles back then; many homes either still had gas lighting, or had to plug their very few appliances into electric light fittings as there was no standard for wall sockets at the time.)

It wasn't until the 1950s that society started to move towards greater equality in the workplace. Even today, there are still issues of pay equality.

Furthermore, Sir Patrick Moore served in the RAF during WW2. He lived through six years of relentless wartime anti-German propaganda, found the love of his life killed by enemy bombing raids, saw his brothers in arms killed in action and was also shot down himself. You do not get to demand he switches instantly from anti-German to pro-German overnight on VE day.

Individual mental injuries take an entire lifetime, and may never heal entirely. Socio-cultural traumas on that scale take generations to heal. (Why do you think insulting the French is such a British tradition?)

VE Day marked the end of the fighting, but not the damage it caused. Wars do not end when the bullets stop flying. For many, the nightmares continue for the rest of their lives. We have a convenient label for this now: PTSD. And every war we've been involved in since WW2 has produced its own PTSD-suffering walking wounded. Their damage is inside, invisible to the naked eye. But it is there nonetheless.

You'd think we'd have learned this as a society by now, but no. We still get ignorant posts like yours.

Meh

I think people mostly appreciated him for his work in astronomy where he was an acknowledged expert. The fact he didn't contribute much to political correctness is pretty irrelevant as I don't think many people consulted him over that.

RIP Very sad.

I've been lucky to catch most of the recent episodes of the Sky at Night... how could I not, with recent events such as the landing of Curiosity on Mars, and the deaths of Neil Armstrong and Sir Bernard Lovell of radio telescope fame (covered on the same episode?). Not to mention the ongoing journeys of the Voyager probes as they begin to enter interstellar space...

I was of an age to be the target audience for Gamesmaster, but was already aware of who he was... and remembered at the time (a re-run, obviously) Monty Python parodying his verbal delivery. My favourite was the Radio 4 version of Dead Ringers, ringing him up in the voice of Tom Baker's Doctor Who. "Davros is planning an invasion of Earth from Mars, but we don't know from where on the Red Planet he is basing his invasion"... Sir Patrick didn't miss a beat, and immediately gave three likely spots, as well as concisely giving his reasoning behind the choices, before picking the most likely. A prank call done with affection (John Culshaw has appeared in recent episodes of The Sky At Night, including an anniversary edition) which allowed the 'victim' the best lines. (Though John Culshaw as 'The Doctor' ringing up Tom Baker himself was priceless... "I am the Doctor" / "No, I am the Doctor... y'know, I always fancied Davros" )

That Patrick Moore met Orville Wright I find amazing, just as I do the short period of time between the first heavier-than-air manned flight and the first man on the moon.

Science Fiction author, too

Farewell to the one time finance minister of the Monster Raving Loony party :-(

Seemed like a great bloke to me, and still brings a smile to my face thinking about some of his eccentricities, and the first Astronomy book I got from the library as a kid was one of his.

If he did hold some personal views which some people disagree with at least he kept them to himself and just did what he was good at. Unlike so many so called celebrities these days who think their opinions are so important that they have to be foisted on the rest of us.

Stick him into a photon torpedo tube and fire him off into the Milky Way !

Re: "That Patrick Moore met Orville Wright I find amazing, "

I'd imagine that since BBC4 the chances of Sky At Night like programming has gone up somewhat - I'm currently watching a series on a history of rubbish disposal in the UK and have an ongoing "most boring sounding documentary that turned out to be the most interesting." with a friend.

(In case you were wondering, I'm winning with a socio-political history of the shipping container.)

BBC 4 has some very good factual stuff, science in particular, it's well worth a look.

I wrote to him once...

... asking his opinion on some of my ideas for my school D&T project. I was absolutely stunned to receive his reply, typed on a filing card (now I know what the typewriter was!) and signed. Life-changing stuff when you're 14... I still have that card, somewhere.

Re: I wrote to him once...

Likewise! I wrote to him after reading his autobiography "80 Not Out" to not only say how much I had enjoyed it but to also point out a bunch of typos and mistakes. He replied saying he knew all about the mistakes and had sent a list of them to the printers who had then lost the corrections and printed it as is anyway! He sounded quite annoyed!

I'll miss him

I actually had the rare honour of being invited to his home when I was 10. He had been giving a presentation for a lunch at my dad's place of work. They started chatting and he invited us all over. I got to see Mars through the massive telescope in his back garden and he asked me to sketch what I saw. I think I still have the drawing in a signed book he gave me. Later that evening he brought out his wooden xylophone and taught my sister how to play a couple of songs.

I have a memory of Sir Patrick chastising someone for saying it was a xylophone.

Re: I have a memory of Sir Patrick chastising someone for saying it was a xylophone.

It was, indeed a xylophone. Glockenspiel has metal bars, xylophone has wooden ones. Since his fiancee was killed by the Germans, I hardly think his choice of instrument would be the former, somehow.....

Like many of my age, having been brought up with him "always there in the background of science" I owe him a debt of gratitude. He showed how to be committed, and remained inspiration and sharp till the end. There is a huge void now. A big pair of boots to fill. Will be missed by many RIP PM

Re: A great communicator.

You're absolutely right. These days the BBC (and others) like to employ academics as presenters. Many of these, but by no means all, are duller than a very dull thing and couldn't make their subject sound interesting if their lives depended on it.

It seems production companies believe that expertise is more important than the ability to communicate on the subject under discussion. Worse still these people then become more general presenters and are employed to talk about subjects of which they know nothing.

My favouritest story about Patrick was the one about the stamps. Apparently he would stick the stamp on a letter anywhere other than the approved top right corner of the envelope. In the days of hand sorting this harmless eccentricity was no problem, but when automatic sorting machines came along they couldn't cope and his letters had to be hand sorted. So one day the Royal Mail sent him a letter (presumably working out who he was from the return address) asking him in future to place the stamp in the correct place.

Patrick replied to this letter with the address written to one side of the letter, allowing him to place the stamp in the centre of the envelope. The reply read simply, "Hey diddle diddle, the stamp's in the middle."